Designing our Front-End

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” –Steve Jobs.

Building a Discord bot isn't just focusing on chat commands and the powerful API that Discord provides. When we, as a team, joined up in a voice channel on Discord and starting to design and discuss what Sputnik should be like and how can we make it easy to use.

You may already know that there is a ton of bots being created and added into guilds every day. You may already know that some bots are super easy to add into your server, configure, and begin using the bot and some are down right hard and confusing to setup. A great example of this spectrum of Discord bots easy and complex setup is Mee6 and Rowboat. Mee6 is super easy to add to your server, toggle a few things in the config and you are ready to go. However, Rowboat is as complex as rocket science (if not more). Guild admins are required to find IDs for plugins they would like to enable as well as type it in the config and follow the YAML format. However, ease of setup usually brings a lack of power in the bot.

Mee6 vs Rowboat's config

So you may be wondering "How are we designing Sputnik's Front-End"? We are providing an easy-to-use basic configuration editor, like Mee6, simple and easy to setup. In contrast we are also providing an advanced configuration editor that allows advanced users to setup and configure the bot without having to sacrifice the configurability found in complex bots.

Welp that wraps this dev ops blog post up. Keep watching our Twitter, Discord, and blog for more dev updates and screenshot leaks of our Front-End and everything related to the bot!

P.S. If you are still reading this, here is a spoiler of the front-end for you.